Teen arrested for using app to “shoot” his classmates with a cellphone

Police arrested a 15-year-old high-schooler Thursday in Louisiana for “terrorizing” his classmates with a phone app that edits video to make them appear as though they are being gunned down

Terrebonne Parish sheriff’s Capt. Dawn Foret told the Lafourche Daily Comet that the H.L. Bourgeois High School student, used a phone app called “The Real Strike” to superimpose video game style guns on video from an iPhone and similar devices. The app allows a user to virtually “shoot” things in front of the camera.

After the teen — who has not been named in media reports — uploaded the video to YouTube, parents called police to investigate. The student’s parents told police that he made the video because he had been bullied, and had no intention of hurting anyone, Foret said, calling the arrest an “isolated incident.”

Major Malcolm Wolfe told WGNO in Gray, La., that “We have to take all threats seriously and we have no way of knowing that without investigating and getting to the bottom of it.”

The boy is charged with terrorizing and interfering in the operation of a school.